A year ago, Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery, was arrested in a McDonald’s in Ferguson Missouri. The fast-food establishment had been used as a staging area for several reporters, including the Huffington Post’s Ryan Rilley, who was also arrested. Here’s last year’s video clip of Mr. Lowery being harassed by a paramilitary police officer.
Although the men were later released without charges, a year later, they are being charged with “trespassing” by St. Louis County. The Washington Post reports:
A Washington Post reporter who was arrested at a restaurant last year while reporting on protests in Ferguson, Mo., has been charged in St. Louis County with trespassing and interfering with a police officer and ordered to appear in court.
Wesley Lowery, a reporter on The Post’s national desk, was detained in a McDonald’s while he was in Missouri covering demonstrations sparked by a white police officer fatally shooting an unarmed black 18-year-old.
“Charging a reporter with trespassing and interfering with a police officer when he was just doing his job is outrageous,” Martin Baron, executive editor of The Post, said in a statement Monday. “You’d have thought law enforcement authorities would have come to their senses about this incident. Wes Lowery should never have been arrested in the first place. That was an abuse of police authority.
According to the summons, Lowery is being charged with trespassing on private property despite being asked to leave. He is also charged with interfering with a police officer’s performance of his duties because, the summons alleges, he failed to comply with “repeated commands to immediately exit” the restaurant.
These counts carry a possible fine of $1,000 and up to a year in a county jail, according to the St. Louis County municipal code.
“I maintained from the first day that our detention was illegal and unnecessary,” Lowery, who is in Ferguson covering demonstrations there, said in a telephone interview Monday. “So I was surprised that a year later this is something officials in St. Louis County decided was worth revisiting.”
Lowery and Ryan Reilly, a journalist with the Huffington Post, were handcuffed last August inside a McDonald’s that reporters had been using as a staging area while covering the Ferguson protests.
While Reilly had not received a court summons Monday, Whitlock said Monday night that Reilly has been issued a summons on the same charges.
“A crime was committed at the McDonald’s, not by journalists, but by local police who assaulted both Ryan and Wesley Lowery of The Washington Post during violent arrests,” Ryan Grim, the Huffington Post’s Washington bureau chief, and Sam Stein, the site’s senior politics editor, said in a statement Monday night. They added: “If Wesley Lowery and Ryan J. Reilly can be charged like this with the whole country watching, just imagine what happens when nobody is.
Lowery said he was given conflicting information about where to exit and was attempting to gather his bag when officers grabbed him, slammed him into a soda machine and placed plastic cuffs on him. Reilly, speaking to the Huffington Post last year, said the police gave the reporters “a countdown like we were 5-year-olds.”
Of course, this is just the latest incident in an ongoing “war on journalism” being perpetrated by the corporate-state. Just yesterday, I published a piece titled: The New York Times Warns About the Pentagon Labeling Journalists “Unprivileged Belligerents.”
Meanwhile, how did the Colombia, Missouri Police Officers Association decide to commemorate the death of unarmed teen Michael Brown at the hands of police officer Darren Wilson? By celebrating the cop in declaring Sunday, “Darren Wilson Day” on their Facebook page. Yeah that’ll help things out.
Morons.
From the St. Louis Post Dispatch:
COLUMBIA, Mo. A Facebook posting declaring Sunday “Darren Wilson Day” in this college town brought protesters to the police station on Monday and strong criticism from city leaders.
A post on the Columbia Police Officers Association’s Facebook page, which appeared on the one-year anniversary of the fatal shooting of black teenager Michael Brown by white Ferguson police Officer Darren Wilson, called Wilson “an innocent, but persecuted, officer.”
The post included a message saying that support for Wilson has nothing to do with race. The author of the post said the police union supports Wilson because of “the fact that he was thoroughly investigated … and found he did NOTHING wrong.”
“The Columbia Police Department is a separate entity from CPOA and does not in any way condone the use of social media, or any other medium, to promote divisive messages in our community,” stated the release, approved by Burton. “The Columbia Police Department will not allow a statement such as this to hinder our constant efforts to open the lines of communication with all people in our community.”
For related articles, see:
“A Good Time Was Had By All” – The Obamas Dance the Night Away as Ferguson, Missouri Burns
Picture of the Day – Iraq or the United States? A Photo from Ferguson, Mo
In Liberty,
Michael Krieger
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TREASON! Throw the bums out, clean house and take back our constitutional Republic.
Amazing. How stupid is it to prosecute a shaky case against journalists that work for national media and can shape more opinion on a coffee break than this county and police department can in a year. Morons always seem to want to double down on the flat line thing.